The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

You can’t see behind space, or beyond time. Everything you think and feel and perceive happens in those terms. We’ve looked into it. In some detail, Charles. It turns out there is something in the real reality, outside of our minds, something our minds perceive in terms of space and time. The thing itself, whatever it is, isn’t metres and kilometres, seconds and hours. Not that. It’s a mode of – amplitude – of a different kind. We look at the universe and see that it is vast, and that spatial vastness reflects something important about the thing in itself. It’s not a literal mapping from its spatial scale to our sense of space, though.’

Crankiness sublimed into anger, which, as an Englishman, and according to the logic of my tribe, I expressed through exaggerated politeness.

The universe is that juncture between your perception and the thing itself. What scientists were doing was uncovering more accurately something about the thing itself. And that something is this: that the closer we look at it, the more it threatens to overpower our ability to process it in terms of space and time. After all, who can really conceive of trillions of years, hundreds of billions of light years?

Just the fact of existence. The whatever it is that you perceive, and which your mind orders with reference to time, space and the other seventeen categories. The thing, itself. So: ask yourself this. Do you believe it to be inert this thing? Or vital?